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It’s Time to See How the Rookies Will Play

A view of Citi Field from the dugout, where players and coaches will be taking notes when the action starts on Friday night.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Let the scouting begin.

Not of the 100 players on the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Cubs, whose veteran rosters have appeared in more than 50,000 major league games and are among the most battle-tested in the majors. Instead, as soon as they step from the dugout on Friday night, all those players, coaches and managers will start assessing what two rookies — the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field — have. How they play, their quirks, their character.

The Yankees’ Johnny Damon wants to check out the dirt around second base, to see if its consistency will require him to cut the bag at a different angle than he did across the street. Razor Shines, the Mets’ third-base coach, plans to grab a fungo bat and pepper the outfield corners with would-be doubles, to see how the balls carom and influence his decisions to send runners home.

“There’s going to be some getting used to it,” Damon said. “I wish we could immediately have home-field advantage, but we’ll have to see how the batter’s eye is. We’ll have to see if the lights are different. If the grass is different. There’s a breaking-in period.”

The Cubs will be in the Bronx and the Red Sox in Queens to help christen the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field with exhibition games Friday night and Saturday. Those teams, however, can explore the new fields with only curiosity — after all, they won’t play there during the regular season.

But the Mets and the Yankees want to learn how to exploit their new homes as quickly as possible. Sure, the home clubhouse might have some extra amenities. Whether more whirlpools translates to more wins is another matter altogether.

Of the 30 current teams, all but three — the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Florida Marlins and the Oakland A’s — have upgraded by moving into new structures during their history, some more than once. The past suggests that moving to a newly built stadium does not improve a team much.

The season before the moves, the teams collectively had a .495 winning percentage, which translates to 80 victories in a standard 162-game season. In their ballparks’ debut seasons, the teams improved to a .516 winning percentage, or about 83 ½ victories. (The records used for the five stadiums that opened during a season were the year-plus before and the year-plus after.) Even though there was a slight improvement, the jump almost certainly shouldn’t be ascribed to the new digs.

This is mostly because franchises, particularly in the past dozen years, often start rebuilding their clubs several years before their moves, then begin splurging on established stars just as the new park opens. The forerunner of this might have been the early-1990s Cleveland Indians, whose general manager, John Hart, synchronized his young roster so that it would mature just as Jacobs Field was born in 1994. The Indians reached the World Series in 1995 and 1997, and the Indians sold out their new stadium, now called Progressive Field, several years in a row.

Also, even as their overall records rose, teams didn’t improve as much in home games, where any new-stadium effect would be felt most. Teams’ home records increased slightly less than their away records during their ballparks’ first years.

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This doesn’t stop teams from believing their new park helped, which in a game known as being 90 percent half-mental can mean a 70 percent boost in confidence. The Phillies left-hander Jamie Moyer was with the Seattle Mariners when the hitter-friendly and dreary Kingdome gave way to expansive Safeco Field, and he believed that the new atmosphere alone — literally and figuratively — improved the Mariners’ mind-sets.

“I think it affected us in a positive way,” Moyer said. “A fresh new place, more excitement, playing outdoors. There was a newness that put a bounce in the step of employees in the organization.”

The Baltimore Orioles enjoyed a staggering jump from 67-95 to 89-73 in their first year at Camden Yards in 1992, with players raving that the place felt like a well-worn glove from Day 1. (Cal Ripken told friends, “I can’t believe no one has played a game here before.”) Then again, the Houston Astros plummeted from 97 wins while playing at the Astrodome in 1999 to just 72 the next season at Enron Field, perhaps the first signs of trouble for their park’s naming sponsor.

Oddly enough, the St. Louis Cardinals’ record slipped from 100-62 to 83-78 when they moved from one Busch Stadium to another three seasons ago, but they won the World Series. (So did the Yankees in the first year of the now-old Yankee Stadium in 1923.) The Cardinals’ manager, Tony La Russa, said recently that the biggest adjustments came when the team removed old Busch Stadium’s artificial turf in 1996, but that when moving to the new place he still kept his eye out for more esoteric changes.

“You want to see if the ball carries differently, if there are quirks in the outfield and foul territory, and if the infield dirt is different to see if that will affect how infielders should react,” La Russa said.

On Monday, at Mets camp in Port St. Lucie, Fla., Shines bubbled about his first task upon arriving at Citi Field for Friday’s game against the Red Sox. The new outfield wall is not Shea Stadium’s smooth arc but a series of convex and concave angles that would befuddle even Pythagoras going from first to home. Shines is about to give that wall a beating, so that he doesn’t take one himself when he waves around runners.

“I’m going to grab my fungo bat and get busy on that thing,” Shines said. “I’m going to see how the ball bounces now instead of waiting to see what happens. Nobody knows now how it’s going to play. But we want to understand what we can about the ballpark that other teams will have to learn.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Time to See How the Rookies Will Play. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe